Aahhhh, the Winter Olympics. It seems like just yesterday a bobsled team from Jamaica captured the heart of a nation. But while the rest of the news media is out sensationalizing the world's greatest cold-blooded athlete (read: Tonya Harding), we at Ivy Roundup, the last bastion of journalistic integrity, are here, stateside, picking up the pieces left after another weekend of Ivy League basketball. · Ignominy of the week Wasn't it just two years ago that Princeton made it to the NCAA Tournament? Now, in a crash reminiscent of 1929, the Tigers have suffered the insult of all insults, the shame of all shames. They lost to Brown. The Tigers are trying to get used to the fact that with two Ivy losses (including one to Brown), they have no chance at the title. "Exactly who is Penn gonna lose to besides us?" said Daily Princetonian staffer Jeff Amy, who asked not to be identified. Amy, our anonymous source, obviously a heavy drug user, continued, "This weekend was not funny. We lost to Brown." After Friday night's game against Yale was cancelled due to bad weather, the team bus got stuck in a major traffic jam on the way to Providence. "That must have been a really cheery bus ride," Amy said in reference to spending several hours in a bus with Tiger egomaniac Rick Hielscher. According to our source "Bill" at Brown, Hielscher was cocky even as a lad. It seems Bill and Rick went to rival high schools. In one game, Bill's team was down by one with 20 seconds to go. They cornered Rick, who naturally threw away the pass. Alas, Bill's team blew the ensuing fastbreak layup and lost. "It's always good to beat Princeton," he said. "They play that same boring offense." We agreed and said goodbye. But Bill began rambling about how good Penn is, as if we didn't already know. "If you guys get a decent seed, you guys should win at least one game." Then Bill began to hallucinate: "If we had Jerome Allen, we could do that too." Come on Bill. Go to sleep. You guys suck. · Hard Copy-like probe of the week When a rumor began circulating that Brown scrub/international playboy Johannes Kaps has a brother who is a professional lion tamer, it didn't take long before it got back to us through a reliable source. But when Roundup began launching its own investigation into the matter, it became pretty clear we had stumbled onto a massive coverup. When we confronted one of our many sources at Brown about it, he pleaded ignorance, naturally. "He's from Japan, but he went to school in Switzerland," our source said. "He's a real international guy. I don't think he played basketball before he went to Brown. (Did anybody?) I know he played ping pong in high school, so he'd be a two-sport athlete if Brown had a ping-pong team." Thanks for nothing. Next we decided to go straight to the lion's mouth -- Kaps himself. When we asked him about the rumor, Kaps laughed uneasily, as if he was hiding something, so we probed further. Roundup: "So there's no truth to the rumor that your brother tames lions?" Johannes: "No. My brother is a student at Carnegie-Mellon." Sure, Johannes, if that is your real name. We contacted Carnegie-Mellon and they had no record of any lion tamers with the last name Kaps. · Woe are the Lions story of the week Wasn't it just two weeks ago that Columbia looked as if it might actually stop sucking long enough to win some games? This weekend, however, the Lions, doing their best impersonation of Brown, dropped both of their games to weak Ivy sisters Dartmouth and Harvard. The Lions are led by front courters Jamal Adams and Steve Marusich, a pair of Los Angeles natives dubbed "the Fault Line Front Line." Apparently, Lions beat writer Adam Epstein (how pathetic is that?) was inspired to coin the phrase after the recent earthquake in California. "I guess it makes light of where we're from," said Adams, the budding genius. The Faulty Front Line, as they have come to be known at Roundup, were certainly impressive against Dartmouth, allowing the Big Green only 80 percent of their points from inside five feet. But the Lions have bigger problems than just bad nicknames. Apparently, Columbia has been developing several new ways of turning the ball over, including the one where you kick it out of bounds on a fastbreak layup. This prompted one Columbia source who also thinks he is a Letterman Show writer to quip, "We have more turnovers than a pastry shop." Perhaps the best example of how the Lions are revolutionizing basketball came in their last possession of the Harvard game, trailing by one point: "We get the shot blocked by a 5-foot-10 guy (Tarik Campbell) from 10 feet away, which is just @!$^%' ridiculous. But don't quote me on that," Epstein said off the record.
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